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The music artist takes his ideas and creativity, packs them in his rucksack along with his guitar, and goes on a trip. And at the end of the journey, songs are born.

Making a music album is no less than a journey for the artist who makes it. It’s about embracing your creativity and thoughts and seeing them evolve into music. But this evolution, it takes time. It doesn’t wait to happen when you first enter the studio. It actually starts much before that. For Ajit Padmanabh, the journey to World Void Web and ultimately Think Void started off as him as a child, listening to Michael Jackson’s Bad. Hooked from the very first listen, it ushered to him a new world of sounds and instruments. He spent years absorbing those sounds, night and day. Years later he began dabbling with the keyboard and then progressed to guitar. With the guitar as his first choice, WVW kickstarted it as a lead guitarist for his college band, performing covers for rock and metal songs. Michael Jackson and Carnatic music legends were appended with Pink Floyd and Metallica, in his quest for new sounds. Along with it, a renewed interest in history and mythology began to appear, and the first seeds of a new way of musical expression started to develop. An expression without words.

Dabbling with instrumental music for several years, and a voracious reading of books, journals, e-articles, theories or opinions, on Indian philosophy, science and autobiographies instilled in him, a whole new direction and self-belief. It is this self-belief that compelled WVW to take a sabbatical from his successful career in IT industry, dwell on the concept of Akash or Void and bring Think Void to reality.

And that’s what WVW’s debut album, Think Void, is made up of. A journey filled with his inspirations and learnings, seeking the elusive Voidophone (Sound of Void) : all leading up to the first day of recording – Every bit of it shaping the idea that was Think Void. And the best part is that the journey has just begun! Let’s see what the next leg of the journey leads to!

It all started in 2006 when I wanted to convert some of my songs to recorded music. Initially, it was a very basic setup with an 8-channel mixer, a guitar with a Zoom 606 pedal, a tape recorder (Yes, a tape recorder back then and all on tape!), and MIDI software. All the songs that were on the older “World Void Web” site were single-track recordings, un-mastered.
I have come a long way since then, and have been procuring equipment, customizing furniture to hold the equipment and with time, the studio has evolved to what it is now. Since my music is about the “Void” experience, I thought it was apt to call it Blank Point Studios. In the Studio’s logo, the 7 lines denote the 7 notes of music and the circle they create forms the “blank point”.

Located at my house in Bangalore, Blank Point Studio consists of PHONIC MU-802 mixer, Mackie Studio Monitors, Zoom H2 digital recorder, AKAI MPK-61 MIDI Controller Keyboard, Digitech GNX4 workstation, BOSS ME-50 Guitar Pedal, Marshall MG10CF amplifier, a couple of speaker systems from Bose and PolkAudio to get the sonic experience, A 4-channel MUX to route the audio output to any speaker configuration in the studio, A 4-channel router to enable multiple headphone inputs required in case of chorus recording, AKG Quincy Jones Studio Headphones, M-AUDIO condenser MIC, Fender Starcaster electronic drum set, Radel equipment like Taalmala and Shruti box, percussion equipment like Rainstick and other “sound toys”. There is also a NI Maschine control surface, which is primarily used to record grooves.

While all these were wired earlier, they are all now inter- connected within customized furniture to mask all the wiring. The studio also houses an iMac (new procurement as a result of evolution of my sound and recording quality and an infinite ambition!) as well as a PC (Intel core-i5 quad-core@3GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, to be phased-out) which is essentially used to edit the recorded sounds, overlay the MIDI sounds, mix and master the recording. It is also used to create the videos that have been made thus far. iMac hosts ProTools, Ableton, Logic along with a host of plugins, VSTi for arrangements, mixing and mastering.
The speaker systems are configured via a MUX and have been acquired to give me a feel of the sonic experience – the philosophy being that if the sound is rich and complete in a low wattage output, it would be good with any other speakers. Though my AKG studio headphones give me the studio recording sound, I’d prefer to listen to the sound on different speaker configurations to ensure the recording is perfect enough to be heard through a variety of audio devices. The output sound is controlled through a Denon high current Amplifier.

Up Above the Sky so high! – Do you see any physical boundaries? Or any sign of chaos? Well, this is how the world seems devoid of all man-made beliefs, commotions – Simple and unending. It is this sense of infinite peace just around us, that each of us yearns for, within ourselves. Yet, being within the world, we are so detached and disconnected from this world. Little by little, we are conditioned to the ways of life and get entangled within those ways, to merely survive. To survive in this illusion, we get driven into man-made policies and laws, inherently imperfect and far from fair. Little do we realise that it’s just a matter of putting a pause in a life so full of rat-races, and learn from the world around us.

Nazca Lines – with light playing tricks on various branches, this looks more like the illusive Nazca lines – A relic from the ancient world that some believe to be a potent sign of advancement. It is believed that Nazca lines, situated in Peru, are the earliest form of runways in the ancient world, with intricately woven pathways that resemble the complexities of modern-day runways. Why did we have runways in the ancient world? Well, a scientific segment believes that our forefathers were not as primitive as we have made them to be. A lot of civilizations were scientifically advanced and seemingly connected with the worlds outside. It is believed that we as a race on this planet, were aliens to begin with, and were “seeded” to nurture this world like many other worlds. Come to think of it – there is a startling set of differences between humans and other life-forms on this planet. We can communicate, thereby creating “languages” with which we can “read” and “write”. We are “musical” and can differentiate between harmonies in nature. We have “inherited” “scriptures” that explain to us the purpose of our existence and that it’s more than mere existence. Our forefathers looked up to the skies to “understand” the concept of “time”, “stars”, “galaxies”, “planets”, and could correlate the micro cosmos with the macro cosmos, much before the present-day modern civilization could even comprehend it. Makes one wonder “who” or “where did we come from” if we are not from this planet – the void, possibly?

Anger from the Mountains – Volcanic Ash? The photo creates an illusion of the clouds forming a part of the volcanic ash erupting from the “Volcano” hill! It’s intriguing to note that man has always associated emotions with the acts of nature. Call it the limited perception of humans or their ability to perceive “unknowns” with “knowns”. We regard it as a “violent” act that can potentially “kill” or make a community or civilization “extinct”. Since the beginning of time, volcanic eruptions have known to be acts of nature aimed at maintaining the delicate balance that exists in this planet’s ecosystem. It’s a different world altogether within the volcano wherein organisms are believed to breed in high temperatures! Though modern science has come to take note of this through constant research and analysis over the last few centuries, mythologies all over the world spoke of Volcanoes as a different world, with references to demons and an “underworld”.

Illusion or Reality? – Looks like a huge spider crawling on the rock! But then, yes, it does not exist. Thanks to the thick vegetation around the rock and the time of the day, the “spider” shadow is projected right on the rock to create this illusion – nature’s way of saying “Seeing – is not believing”. While sight is widely recognized as one of the important senses, it has been deemed deficient in its own right. Indian Mythology is replete with stories to illustrate this notion. Why, then, are we so susceptible to be judgmental by sight? While what is presented to us might be an illusion or a farce, why do we take it for real?

Is change really inevitable? – This is what comes to my mind when I look at the Sun. For billions of years, it has been the source of life on this planet – organisms (Yonis in Sanskrit means species and it’s believed that there are 84000 of it on every Earth) came and went, we came and shall go, with time – but the Sun continues to shine and spread light. As much as it’s part of the world, it’s outside it. It’s as though Sun has been assigned to pass a cryptic message to us – when we decrypt it, we realize that somewhere down the line, we started meddling with nature and believed that we could change the course of human civilization – In the end, we did but will leave it to the reader’s judgment if it’s for the better or for the worse. The reality is that we are so small and insignificant that there shall be many of us across eons but we will witness Sun as it is, unchanged and following the rules of nature bestowed upon it.

For centuries, poets have romanticized Moon and made it synonymous with the niceties of life. While Science regards it as one of the most “ugly” objects and a satellite for our planet, mythology treats Moon as a planet and is known to be an embodiment of sensuality. Moon was prime property during the Cold War era with both superpowers trying to edge one another to be the first to land on Moon! It still continues to intrigue man’s imaginative senses. While we see the moon every day, how many of us stop to think that it has been in place since time immemorial and we in our lifetime tend to think that we know all about it?